This invention relates to safety seats for vehicles. The invention has particular application to the provision of a safety seat for children and for the physically handicapped, and is intended to provide an improved level of protection to the head during side impact vehicle accidents.
During early development the neck of an infant is not strong enough to fully support the head in an upright position. Thus, even in a semi-reclined position the head, if not laterally supported, will fall to one side or the other if not provided with supplemental support.
Side impacts have the potential to violently accelerate the child's head in one direction and rebound the head in the opposite direction after the much-wider shoulders have been restrained against further movement by contact with the side of the seat. If the lateral head restraint pads are sufficiently far apart substantial additional lateral movement of the head is permitted, with the possibility of injury.
Numerous patents disclose various types of safety seats for young children. It is known to provide a child's safety seat in the form of a molded concave shell having an integrally-formed seat back and seat bottom with padding that provides bilateral and anterior support for the child's body. An example is U.S. Pat. No. 6,135,553. These seats generally maintain the infant in a semi-reclining position.
Children's safety seats of the foregoing type are typically provided in a single size. A child's head grows rapidly during the first year, and the head of a new-born infant is much smaller than that of, for example, a one year-old child, although in both cases the head is relatively heavy in relation to the total body weight.
Some such safety seats do not provide side head restraint pads. Other safety seats provide lateral head restraint pads intended to prevent excessive lateral movement of the head during a side impact. These pads decrease the distance from one interior side of the seat to the other in the region of the head, and are generally designed as a compromise between the varying head sizes of a new-born infant and a child as old as, for example, 15 months. In both such cases it is common for parents to use rolled receiving blankets or cloths placed around the side and rear of the head to form supplemental head restraints to prevent lateral movement of the head in the seat. This is not a desirable practice since, in a crash, the loose padding would not likely remain in place, particularly if the side impact is a secondary impact.
The restraints according to the various embodiments of the invention provide a means of easily and quickly adjusting the space within which the head of the infant is placed, permit customization for a particular infant, accommodate infant growth during one or more use cycles of the safety seat, and enhance protection against the consequences of a side impact.